The writers of fashionable novels may be divided, as to their social positions, into the tolerated fashionable novel writers, and the intolerable fashionable novel writers; the first, moving in phases more or less equivocal round their centre and their deity, the exclusive set; the last, desperate from the fact of their total and permanent exclusion from society, but still moving round the outside of the boundary wall, and peeping through chinks in the palings. From the former we have the eulogistic, from the latter the depreciatory fashionable novels; these make us familiar with the celestial attributes of countesses-dowager, and the amiability of their pugs. They are slavering, servile, self-degrading productions, and only serve the exclusives as provocatives to laughter; they are usually written by tutors, ladies who have married tutors, or superannuated governesses, patronized by some charitable member of some distinguished family.
The depreciatory or vilificatory fashionable novel delights in exposing the peccadilloes, or imagined peccadilloes, (for it is all the same,) of young or old people of fashion: a _gourmand_ peer, a titled demirep, a "desperate dandy," a black-leg, and a few such other respectable characters, are dialogued through the customary number of chapters, and conducted to the usual catastrophe: virtue is triumphant, vice abashed, towards the latter end of the last volume; and some low-born hero and heroine, introduced to exhibit, by contrast, the vices of the aristocracy, suddenly, and without any effort of their own, acquire large fortunes, perhaps titles, which it would have been just as easy to have given them at first--go to church in an orthodox manner, and set up a virtuous aristocracy of their own.
We are indebted for this class of fashionable novel to outlaws of both sexes; persons who might have held, but for their own misconduct, respectable positions in society; persons of this sort have the impudence, with their no-characters staring them in the face, to set up as public instructors, and to give us ensamples, drawn from their own perverted imaginations, of a class of which they might have known something, but which it is now past human possibility they can ever know.